I have just completed a week long 35hr professional training with Paul Fox and Heather Mason at the Yoga in Healthcare Alliance! I am now part of a national movement bringing yoga into the NHS which is very exciting indeed – for both patients and health professionals. I’m able to offer the Yoga4Health Yoga on Prescription 10-week social prescribing programme to NHS patients. 

There’s significant evidence for yoga as an effective ‘mind-body’ medicine that can both prevent and manage chronic health issues and it also delivers significant cost savings to healthcare providers. Yoga’s ability to help cultivate physical and mental wellbeing is becoming increasingly accepted, and it’s having a tangible impact on health care systems wherever it’s applied.

Thanks to this wealth of credible scientific research, it is now widely accepted that by modifying our behaviour and lifestyle choices through yoga, we can start to prevent the majority of disease related suffering throughout the world.

The advancement in both science and research has also enabled us to understand the underlying mechanisms of yoga, and how physical yoga postures, breath regulation techniques and deep relaxation practices can positively impact our health and wellbeing.

This basic research has indicated that yoga has profound effects on:

• Physical characteristics such as flexibility, balance and coordination
• Respiratory characteristics including breath capacities, volumes and gas exchange
• Mental characteristics including emotion and stress regulation, mood and resilience, and cognitive functioning, and even on deeper quality of life characteristics including life meaning and purpose and spirituality.

These overarching benefits are particularly effective for reducing the risk factors associated with noncommunicable lifestyle diseases, including common disorders such as cardiovascular diseases, obesity, diabetes, mental health conditions, and disorders of elderly cognitive decline, which represent the greatest mortality and burden on the health care system.

If you want to sign up for a 10 week course – or if you wish to offer this course to your patients as part of a Social Prescribing Programme please contact me. Hoping to begin in September 2020 in Brighton.

For more info about this Programme

Details of the Programme